


Give Loneliness Meaning

by muchmorethanaprincess



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Harper and Monty are in this for about 2 seconds, emotional angst, post season 2 reunion fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2015-07-17
Packaged: 2018-04-09 18:27:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4359647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muchmorethanaprincess/pseuds/muchmorethanaprincess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke comes back to Camp Jaha, and Bellamy's happy to see her, but he's also pissed that she left. He can only avoid looking at her for so long before she demands an explanation.</p><p>“Can you just-” she breaks off, makes that irritated sound again. “Can you just look at me? At my face, for once?”</p><p>So he turns to face her, and lifts his eyes slowly, agonizingly to meet hers. “Why Clarke? Does it feel any better?” He knows it doesn’t, because now that he’s really looking at her she can see the anger behind his eyes, and it feels like something between them that they won’t be able to break down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Give Loneliness Meaning

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by a post I saw saying that we need more of Clarke sketching the 100. I completely agree, and this just sort of... happened. Title comes from the song "Learn to Run" by David Vertesi, which Caitlin (blakesdoitbetter) recommended to me because it's Bellarke af.

Clarke returns to Camp Jaha on a Wednesday. Just walks through the gates like it’s nothing. She’s got a cut on her bicep that her mother frets over, and most of the remaining forty-four rush to hug her and find out where she’s been all this time. Bellamy hangs back, watches discreetly from the side of a cabin, and he thinks he’s probably the only one who can see the anxiety on her face, the way she glances around like there’s too many people and too much noise, like she still isn’t sure about this whole coming back thing. Still, she smiles and nods at the people swarming her, and then her mother leads her through the crowd to the med bay, where she no doubt gets a thorough check-up.

When she walks out twenty minutes later, she’s wearing a new, clean tank top and a bandage around her upper arm, and he steps into her view.

“Bellamy,” she says, a relieved breath leaving her body. She doesn’t run to him like she did once, when she attacked him with a hug and he felt shocked she even cared he was alive. Instead she takes slow, steady steps towards him until they’re standing toe to toe, and then she wraps her arms around his waist, pulling him against her and burying her face against his neck.

“You may not like me right now,” she says when he doesn’t move, “but you’re going to have to deal with it because I want to hug you.”

He laughs, just barely, finally finding some kind of feeling since she walked through the gates, and he moves his arms to hold her in return.

It’s just a hug, and he knows things aren’t _right_ , not yet, but it’s something. She’s back, at least for now, and he feels conflicted, but it still feels good to hug her, to have her hugging him, so he settles for that. He accepts that it’s all he can really understand just now. The rest will come later, he’s sure of that.

 

One hug does not equal a return to their previous friendship, and they both know it. Over the next three weeks, Bellamy can barely look at Clarke, and he fluctuates between mildly annoyed at how seamlessly she fits back into camp life and severely pissed off at the fact that she left in the first place. It’s not that he doesn’t understand why she left, because he _does_. It’s that he wishes she had been strong enough to stay even though it would be difficult. He wishes she had been strong enough to stay for _him_. The past months have absolutely _sucked_ , and he wishes that they could have sucked with her, instead of without her.

It blows up a month after her return, when the council asks Bellamy to take a list of plans to Clarke to look over, and he finds himself in her tent, explaining without making eye contact that they just want her to make sure they haven’t overlooked anything.

“Sure,” she says easily, but he can hear an edge to her voice. When he turns to walk back out, she makes a frustrated sound in the back of her throat. “Wait.”

He stops.

“Can you just-” she breaks off, makes that irritated sound again. “Can you just look at me? At my face, for once?”

So he turns to face her, and lifts his eyes slowly, agonizingly to meet hers. “Why Clarke? Does it feel any better?” He knows it doesn’t, because now that he’s really looking at her she can see the anger behind his eyes, and it feels like something between them that they won’t be able to break down.

“No. It doesn’t feel better, but I’d rather you be mad at me and talk to me than continue avoiding me for who knows how long. How long do you need Bellamy? How long do you need until you can get over this?”

“Get over this? Holy shit Clarke, you have no idea, do you? Get over this? Like it’s something mean you said to me once and I’m too immature to let it go.” He shakes his head and runs his hand over his face in frustration.

“You’re right, I have no idea, so why don’t you tell me Bellamy? Why don’t you tell me why you’re still so angry? Why don’t you tell me what I need to do for you to be able to forgive me?”

“Forgive you? This isn’t about forgiveness Clarke. I forgave you a long time ago, for anything you could ever do against me-”

“Then what is wrong?!” she cuts him off.

“God Clarke, you just left! All of us were hurting, and I know, I know you did things and you couldn’t look at us anymore but I pulled that lever with you, and you left me here to rot in my own disgust. You left me here to take care of _our_ people and I didn’t have a clue if I was making the wrong decisions!”

“I know you don’t understand why I left-”

“No, that’s just it Clarke, I do understand. I understand why you needed to leave, I just wish you hadn’t needed to. I wish that staying here with me, dealing with it together, would have looked more appealing than spending months in the forest by yourself.” He shrugs helplessly, and he isn’t looking at her anymore, can’t handle the despondent frown on her face.

“I’m sorry,” she says, moving closer to him.

He shakes his head. “I don’t want apologies from you."

Clarke thrusts out her hands in frustration. “Then what do you want?” she shouts.

“I didn’t even know if you were alive!” He shouts back, then covers his face with his hands, like he hadn’t meant to let those words out. Clarke stares at him, shocked into silence.

“You could have been dead somewhere, alone, and none of us would have had any idea. And we’d never know if you would have chosen to come back, and we would never know what had happened at all. You could have been dead, and how long would I have waited for you to come back? Fuck, did you even care? About any of us?”

“Of course I cared!” She sounds insulted now, but Bellamy’s done fighting, can’t make himself stay a second longer.

“Whatever Clarke.”

But just as he’s pulling the flap on her tent open, something hits the back of his head and falls to his feet. It’s a soft leather-bound journal, and he leans over to pick it up. When he looks back at Clarke, her back is turned to him, and her voice, thick with tears, says, “I care.” When he doesn’t move, she cries, “Go, Bellamy!”

He leaves, taking the journal with him.

 

Bellamy doesn’t open the worn journal for three days, because he knows that whatever is in it will dissolve his anger, and he’s not ready for that yet. So he stews in it, and when he’s finally ready to look at her again, he cracks it open.

The pages are plain, thick paper, and he sees that while she was gone she sketched a lot of the things she saw but mostly she sketched portraits of the hundred, Jasper and Monty laughing together, and Octavia chasing a butterfly, and Raven bent over a project.

Then there’s Octavia with grounder braids and war paint and a sword, and some portraits of Wells that he can tell are set on the Ark. There’s even one of Murphy, with the trademark asshole expression on his face, and Bellamy sees practice sketches of Anya’s cheekbones, as well as different iterations of Finn – long-haired and clean on their first day on the ground, standing next to Raven by the pod, looking at Clarke with a rifle at his feet and eighteen dead grounder villagers behind him, tied up to a post and slumped over, no longer bleeding but dead. There's Lexa, with and without war paint and armor, a scene that must be her leaving with her army at Mount Weather, and some of Clarke's mother, and a man Bellamy can only assume is her father.

The pictures go on and on, sketches filling every open space on the paper. But more than anyone, there's Bellamy. His face appears every few pages, looking like she wanted to capture every possible angle, and he recognizes the scenes she's placed him in. Clarke has sketched him in the drop ship, pulling the lever to open the door, and later, pulling her out of a pit filled with spikes, and bloody-eyed from the hemorrhagic fever, and then he's standing there unaware that Clarke is about to attack hug him, and he's jumping in front of a sword to get between it and Clarke, and he's leaving for Mount Weather in grounder gear.

And then he's looking at Clarke, desperately, as he hugged Octavia in Mount Weather, neither of them with the army they needed. There are sketches of his hand over hers on the lever to irradiate the mountain, and there's his face, pleading with her to stay. It's enough to make his throat close up with emotion, because those memories have been playing over in his mind since she left, and he's relieved to know he wasn't alone in that.

When he looks closer he notices the tiny notes that Clarke has scratched into some of the margins, and if he hadn't already forgiven her, he would now. "I feel like I'm going crazy," the first one he spots says, and then another, "I can't get their faces out of my head," and Bellamy knows she means the faces of the people from Mount Weather, because he can’t get them out of his head either. There’s a particularly poignant portrait of Maya, filling an entire page with shading and the determination in her eyes. The page next to it is blank save for three small words across the center.

 _She deserved better_.

Bellamy feels tears blur his vision, so he moves on. But he finds another portrait of his face, along with the inscription, "Bellamy showed up in my dreams again last night. I couldn't even look at him." He doesn't start crying until he gets to a scribbled entry that reads, "I can't keep their voices away, everyone telling me what I've done wrong, all the ways I've fucked up, and the dead keep whispering to me. I feel like I'm about to crack. It's worse than it was in solitary. I'm trying to keep my head clear, but then I think - maybe I don't deserve to." He lets the tears fall, and it's more cathartic than he anticipated, so he spends a few minutes crying, and he understands better now. He still wishes she hadn’t left, but he knows she needed something he couldn’t give her, and he can let go now.

 

The next day he walks to her tent, heavy footsteps warning of his approach.

“Clarke?” He says, as he pulls the flap open, but she won’t turn to face him.

He puts one hand gently on her shoulder, and places the journal carefully in her hands with the other.

"You do deserve it Clarke,” he says softly. “You deserve to keep your head clear. You deserve to not be tortured by your ghosts. You don't have to punish yourself anymore. Please don’t punish yourself anymore.”

He can’t see her face, but her shoulders rise under his touch in a shuddering sob, and she turns into his chest, wrapping her arms around his waist in relief. He can feel her tears through his shirt as he hugs back, cradling her head gently with one hand.

“Your sketches are beautiful,” he says, when she’s stopped shaking so much. “You should give the one of Maya to Jasper.”

She nods against his chest and keeps hugging him, and he doesn’t mind. Her solid form under his hands feels comforting, and he knows that _this_ , her presence, is what he needs to get past her absence.

 

The next day Clarke walks cautiously to Jasper, Bellamy following at a distance just in case. She and Jasper have barely talked to each other since she returned, and he doesn’t want the progress she’s made to be wrecked if Jasper still can’t hold himself together.

She holds out the paper from her journal with Maya’s portrait nervously, waiting for a moment as he decides if he’s going to take it. When he does, and sees the sketch, his eyes fill with tears.

“I was-” he breaks off with a sob. “I was starting to forget her face.” He grabs Clarke in a hug before she can realize what’s happening, and she returns it haltingly.

“I’m so sorry Jasper.”

He swallows, like the words are stuck. “You don’t have to apologize for the things you did to keep us alive.”

“Still,” she says sadly as she pulls away from his arms. “I’m sorry there wasn’t a better way.”

Jasper nods, clutching the picture of Maya, and says, “I know.”

 

Clarke gives more of the sketches away to the forty-four, and it makes them happy. Harper jumps into Clarke’s arms when she sees the sketch of her in front of the drop ship, and Bellamy hears her say, “I’m so glad you’re back.” He almost misses Clarke whispering, “me too,” against her hair. When she hands Monty the portrait of him smiling, he thanks her like it’s the best thing anyone’s ever given him, and Clarke smiles bigger than she has since returning to camp.

 

Later, Clarke and Bellamy are alone, sitting by a small campfire on an empty side of camp. She leans into his shoulder and grabs his hand. She expects him to do something to return the gesture, but he’s frozen as a stone.

She lifts her head to look at his profile. “I’m not going to leave again,” she whispers, though there’s no one around to overhear them. It feels like something fragile, something that shouldn’t be spoken about too loudly.

Bellamy tries not to sound bitter. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep Clarke.” His voice is just as quiet as hers, tiptoeing around her absence like she’ll disappear again any second.

She shakes her head. “No. I mean it Bellamy. I don’t want to-” she pauses, and swallows, and grips his hand tighter.

“I don’t know how to share my pain with someone else. But I don’t want to go through it without you anymore.”

He looks down at her face, and the eye contract gives her the strength to push out the last words. “I missed you too much.”

Bellamy feels something in his chest swell with hope, but he doesn’t know what to say, so he just nods, and squeezes her hand.  
“I missed you too Clarke. And to answer your question – you staying. That’s what I want from you. You staying here.”

She nods against his shoulder, smiling now, and runs her thumb over his knuckles soothingly. “I can do that.”

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know what you think if you can! If you want to cry with me about these losers, come find me on tumblr.


End file.
